‘resilience’ … is becoming a key term of art for governing planetary life in the 21st Century …

But the book is then blurbed as follows:

Resilience, they argue, is a neo-liberal deceit that works by disempowering endangered populations of autonomous agency.

My interest here is not so much whether this is an accurate summation
of their book (which is not yet out) but that the discourse of
resilience is framed as disempowering (the word used is “nihilistic”).

I wrote about this last year here, in the context of Neocleous’ piece in Radical Philosophy who argued that we need to “resist resilience”:

In [Neocleous'] view, “resilience is by definition against resistance. Resilience wants acquiescence.”

It is therefore politically disempowering (nihilistic?) and should in
turn be resisted (this task is made more urgent for Neocleous by his
claim that resilience is gaining traction as a replacement for
“sustainability”).

Identifying resilience with dispositif still leaves open the
question of how to interpret it and how to position critique with
regard to its effects.

Neocleous equates resilience with “acquiescence,”
the Evans and Reid book is promoted with the term “nihilistic.” But as Kara Hoover reminds us:

In anthropology, system (cultural) responses to change
tend to interpreted two ways: either system collapse or assimilation.
Resilience of a cultural system signals internal strength and
cohesion … perhaps within the confines of social theory, resilience needs
to be understood as an internal mechanism for maintaining group
cohesion - from an anthropological perspective, internal coherency is the
starting point for a group to overcome external shocks and stresses.

Is it too simple then to say Neocleous = “acquiescence”, Evans/Reid
blurb = “nihilism,” both = disempowerment; ecology and anthropology =
“coherence,” both = rallying point for political activism?

If this is
correct, then Neocleous and Evans & Reid are disempowering themselves. For Wakefield and Braun the object is not to turn away from or reject resilience:

the goal in these papers is also to begin to imagine how
such a dispositif might be inhabited, occupied, appropriated, or
experimented with as part of a new politics of and for the Anthropocene.

And,

There is no secret to be revealed, no foundation or
ground that can be uncovered and returned to. Instead, we argue that the
task of thought is to locate ourselves within this world, mapping it so as to get to know it, to construct other lines that, in their
elaboration and connections, take the map with them. Like hackers, we must get to know the network from within and try to locate its exploits.

This gap or contradiction, if I’ve identified it reasonably, might
remind us of a similar issue regarding Foucault’s notions of power. That
is, that when Foucault says that there is no outside of power, for many
writers this became a reason to interpret power as a negative.

But
Foucault is clear that power is productive; it produces subjects. So how
should we problematize (to use a word Foucault placed into circulation
with some hesitation) resilience, specifically resilience as dispositif? Here’s Wakefield and Braun on this question:

We argue that a critical mistake is made whenever we
imagine a dispositif as a coherent and unified totality. Or, when we
evaluate a dispositif in moral terms as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.